Plasmapheresis in Treatment of Myasthenia Gravis

Treatment of myasthenia gravis is still a rather difficult task, since there is no single tactic to use different drugs (corticosteroids, rituximab, immunoglobulins), especially since it is associated with a number of side effects. They are not able to remove the accumulating autoantibodies and immune complexes, the large size of which does not allow them to be excreted by the kidneys as well. Special problems of treatment arise when myasthenic crises develop associated with respiratory failure requiring artificial lungs ventilation. Plasmapheresis can help to solve this for it is possible to remove antibodies and other pathological metabolites. In addition, regular plasmapheresis is able not only to prevent exacerbations but also to reduce doses of the maintenance therapy with less risk of their side effects, which is confirmed by our own experience

Acquiring Implicit Knowledge by Cognitive Semantics Mapping

This paper describes one way of representation of expert’s knowledge aimed at revealing implicit semantics associated with the chosen domain. For this, two important techniques are combined. First, a space of metaphors is selected to complement a given set of the domain stimuli. An expert then performs a subjective scaling quiz on both domain stimuli and metaphors. Second, a geometrical representation of expert’s answers is built and analyzed. The result is interpreted in terms of theories of psychological meaning. The paper discusses the approach and proposes a template for arbitrary experiments of such ways of knowledge elicitation

Determination of the electromagnetic character of soft dipole modes solely based on quasicontinuous gamma spectroscopy

We show that the combined analysis of the quasicontinuous gamma spectra from the (He-3,alpha) and the (n-thermal,2gamma) reactions gives the possibility to measure the electromagnetic character of soft dipole resonances. Two-step gamma-cascade spectra have been calculated, using level densities and radiative strength functions from the (He-3,alpha gamma) reaction. The calculations show that the intensity of the two-step cascades depends on the electromagnetic character of the soft dipole resonance under study. The difference reaches 40-100% which can be measured experimentally.Comment: 9 pages including 1 table and 2 figure